Third Degree

by Greg Iles

  “So now that you know I’m dying, you love me again?”

  What could she say to that?

  Warren cocked his head as though listening to some faint sound beyond her hearing. “It’s too late. I understand that now. For a while, some options remain open, but then they close. If you don’t act while a door is open, it can shut forever. That’s how life is. If you have a dream when you’re young, you’d better act on it then, or the chance will be gone. You’ll never run a world-record sprint at thirty-five. You don’t become a rock star or a pro baseball player at forty-five.”

  “We’re not talking about childhood dreams!” she cried, suddenly angry. “We’re talking about a marriage! Two beautiful children!”

  “That’s right. We’re talking about family. Trust, remember?”

  Even as she watched him with hope in her heart, his face hardened into a mask of merciless judgment.

  “You can’t step back into that sacred circle after you’ve left it to fornicate with another man.” He raised his arm and pointed at her like some Puritan judge. “You carried his seed into this house. The house that I built to protect you and our children. You carried that man into this house inside your body. And you reveled in it! Didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  Warren stepped closer to the sofa, his hand delving into his pocket. “Don’t lie. We’re through with lies. Admit what you did.”

  “I didn’t do that.”

  “You made him wear a condom?”

  “I didn’t cheat on you!”

  “Liar!” Another step closer. “You make me sick!”

  She glanced past him at Beth’s sleeping form, searching for the strength to keep lying. It could only be a mercy now. “I never betrayed you, Warren. I’ve had a hundred chances, but I never did.”

  He raised his hand high as if to strike her. “LIAR! WHORE!”

  She shut her eyes and waited for the blow.

  “Get up!”

  “I can’t. My feet are taped together.”

  “Get up, damn you! Get your—”

  “Mama? What’s the matter?”

  Beth’s tiny voice stopped Warren’s roar the way a toddler running into the street stops a truck. She was standing in the arch between the study and the great room, her little arms folded protectively across her chest. Wild-eyed, Warren whirled and glared down at her, and she began to whimper. Laurel tried to get up, but he reached back and shoved her down again. Then he screamed like a man going mad.

  • • •

  “He’s going to kill her,” said Danny, quickly checking the instruments on the helicopter’s panel. “We can’t wait any longer.”

  “Christ!” Sheriff Ellis cried from the left-hand seat. “Take us up!”

  “I can’t yet!” Danny waited in near panic, urging the rotors to full rotational speed. The light was gone now, thanks to the storm clouds. For all practical purposes, night had fallen.

  “Black Seven, this is Black Leader,” said Ellis, calling Ray Breen. “We’re going airborne in a matter of seconds. As soon as we’re in a hover over the backyard, Major McDavitt will hit the spotlight, and I’ll give the command to go. The command will be ‘Go,’ repeated three times. A no-go order will be ‘Abort,’ but don’t expect to hear that. Acknowledge.”

  “Black Seven, ten-four.”

  “Black Diamond, are you in position?”

  “In position,” Carl Sims replied. “I’m aiming at the target indicated as most likely by the thermal imager.”

  “Are you ready and willing to fire?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll acquire the target as the windows go down, and fire on your command.”

  No hesitation in that voice, Danny thought. Death was hovering over the Shields house.

  “You’re cleared to fire on Dr. Shields as of this moment,” the sheriff said. “As soon as the windows go down, take the soonest available shot.”

  “Understood,” said Carl.

  “It better be. Everyone else acknowledge by turns that you’re in position.”

  The radio started clicking. “Black One, copy that. In position.”

  “Two, in position.”

  “Three, in position.”

  “Black Four, in position.”

  On it went, up to fifteen. The Bell’s rotors were churning now, pulling the craft away from the earth. Danny pulled pitch with the collective and put her into a hover, then pushed the cyclic and applied power. The chopper rose into the darkness over Avalon.

  Danny swung away from the house, knowing that the noise of the engines would already have drawn Warren’s attention. Do a pedal turn, hover over the backyard, and hit the searchlight. Shields will think the sheriff is trying to see into the great room through those arched windows above the blinds. He’ll probably open one of the blinds a little and peer out, trying to get a fix on the chopper. . . .

  Two seconds later he’ll die.

  With that thought came a hint of new awareness, but Danny didn’t have time to dwell on it. He was making his turn, then crossing over the house to the backyard at seventy feet. He imagined he could see Carl Sims scoping the glowing windows, waiting for the brightly colored blob on an LCD beside him to become a living man. In that moment Warren Shields would cease being Carl’s parents’ doctor and instead become a warm target consisting of center mass with a head and four limbs attached. Carl’s bullet would arrive like a freight train compressed into a quarter-inch-wide spear of copper-jacketed lead—

  “Go lower!” shouted Sheriff Ellis. “Hit the spotlight!”

  Danny switched on the thirty-million-candlepower searchlight mounted beneath the chopper’s nose and aimed it at the second story of the Shields house, keeping it away from the lower windows to be sure it didn’t interfere with the thermal imagers. He nudged the cyclic until they were hovering over the center of the backyard, just forty feet off the ground. He’d already sent a text message warning Laurel to keep away from the windows; he only prayed she’d been able to read it in time.

  “Black Team,” said Sheriff Ellis, “prepare to go on my order.”

  Danny could see the strain Ellis was under in the set of his jaw and the flexed muscles of his big forearms. He reminded Danny of a first-time skydiver preparing to jump—

  “Black Leader, this is Black Diamond!” cried Carl. “We’ve got a problem, repeat, a problem at my position.”

  “This is Black Leader, what’s happening?”

  “I’ve got a kid on the roof of the house!”

  Ellis glanced at Danny, his eyes unbelieving. “You’ve got what? Say again!”

  “A kid on the roof. A child—on the back roof of the house, south side.”

  Danny peered down at the roof, wondering whether Laurel could have gotten Beth up there while Warren was talking to him. He saw no child, though, no movement of any kind.

  “Is it the little girl?” Sheriff Ellis asked.

  “Negative,” said Carl. “Male child, maybe ten years old. He’s trying to get into the house! Through a dormer window.”

  “It’s Grant!” said Danny, sighting the little shape at last. He aimed the searchlight just to the right of the dormer. “See him? There he goes.”

  An agile figure vanished into the house with simian speed, then pulled the window shut after him.

  “Damn it!” bellowed the sheriff. “Where the hell is Sandra Souther?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Danny, holding his hover. “What do we do now?”

  Ray Breen’s voice crackled from the radio. “Let’s hit Shields before the kid can get downstairs. Right now!”

  Sheriff Ellis’s lips parted, but no words emerged. Danny wasn’t sure what the best course was, but he knew one thing: you didn’t learn how to handle this kind of situation on a football field. Ellis was far out of his league.

  “What’s happening on the thermal camera?” Ellis asked.

  “We lost the kid, but my target is steady,” Carl answered. “Target may even be a little closer to the study wind
ow. Can’t tell for sure.”

  “Let’s do it!” barked Ray. “This is our chance!”

  Ellis’s head bowed in the ghostly glow of the cockpit lights. He’s praying, Danny realized. Oh, Jesus—

  “Hold it!” shouted Carl. “Target’s moving laterally now. Toward the kitchen.”

  Ellis’s head snapped up, and he squinted uncertainly at the house.

  “Abort,” Danny said softly.

  As though Danny were speaking through his mouth, Sheriff Ellis cried, “Abort! Abort! This is Black Leader. Abort!”

  “Come on, Billy Ray!” pleaded Ray.

  “Abort,” Ellis repeated, his voice firm. “Everybody stay in position. Trace, can you route the directional mike signal to the chopper?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’ve lost my target,” said Carl. “He’s off the thermal. I think he’s in the kitchen.”

  “This is Black Six, with the thermal cam in front of the house,” said a new voice. “I have a faint reading in the kitchen area.”

  “That’s Shields,” said Ellis.

  Ray Breen’s pumped-up voice distorted the headset speakers. “Forget Carl! Let’s do it the old-fashioned way!”

  Danny felt a rush of panic, but Ellis only shook his head and said, “Stand down, Ray. Land by the command post, Major.”

  “Are you sure?” Ray pressed.

  “Goddamn it!” Ellis yelled. “I gave you an order! Do not, repeat not, blow those windows. Acknowledge!”

  Two clicks sounded in the headsets. Ray Breen couldn’t bring himself to speak, so angry was he over the aborted assault.

  Danny swung the Bell around the house toward the stand of trees that sheltered the trailer. As he flared for the landing, he saw the sheriff’s hands shaking in his lap. Sensing that he was being watched, Ellis quickly rubbed his palms together as though for warmth. Danny hadn’t judged the man a coward for his nerves. He knew that the minute he took his own hands off the controls, they would be shaking, too.

  CHAPTER

  20

  Danny crashed through the door of the command trailer on Sheriff Ellis’s heels. Trace Breen’s head whipped up from his comm gear, a dip of Skoal bulging his bottom lip. Ellis walked to within a foot of him and demanded to know what was happening in the house. Trace shrugged like a crackhead being asked for directions.

  “Do you hear the boy?” Ellis asked. “Grant Shields?”

  Trace shook his head.

  “Any violence?” Danny asked.

  “I don’t know. The last thing I heard after Dr. Shields screamed so crazy was the little girl crying and asking for chocolate milk.”

  “Chocolate milk?” Ellis echoed.

  “Uh-huh. They’re in the kitchen now. The mikes don’t pick up much there, ’cause it’s deeper in the house.”

  “Chocolate milk,” the sheriff repeated, grabbing some paper towels to wipe the sweat and rain from his face. “Christ. What about the thermal camera?”

  Trace keyed a walkie-talkie. “Black Six, this is base. What do you see on the thermal?”

  “I saw three figures turn into two. I think maybe the mother picked up the girl. They’re real faint now. Deeper in.”

  “Any sign of a fourth figure?” Ellis asked.

  “You see anybody else?”

  “I picked up a reading after Carl lost the boy on the back side, just a little green glow, but it’s in and out. Fades almost as soon as I see it.”

  “Where at?” Trace asked, before Danny could prompt him.

  “Kind of central, I guess, almost like it’s between floors. Stairs, maybe?”

  Danny looked at Sheriff Ellis. “The boy might not have let his parents know he’s inside. He might be looking for a way to help his mother. I’ll bet that’s why he went back.”

  “This is a Chinese fire drill,” Ellis said. “They’re in there drinking chocolate milk, and two minutes ago we were about to blow the man’s head off.” He tossed the crumpled paper towels onto the blueprints on the table. “Should we just pack up and get the hell out of here? Let these folks solve their own problems?”

  Danny was about to say Maybe, when Paul Biegler stepped through the door and said, “You should flush your badge down the toilet if that’s your plan. You didn’t have any idea what this job was about when you stood for election, did you?”

  Ellis sniffed and regarded the Medicaid investigator with unconcealed disdain. “I thought it was about catching criminals and protecting the community. Not getting between husbands and wives in domestic disputes.”

  “Warren Shields is a criminal,” Biegler asserted. “He may not be in Kyle Auster’s class, but he has committed multiple felonies. Would it ease your conscience if he’d hit an old lady over the head and grabbed her purse instead of committing fraud?”

  “Get out of my command post,” Ellis said mildly. “Before I knock you out of it.”

  Biegler stepped fearlessly up to the sheriff. “You should have blown the windows and taken him out while you had the chance. Now you’ve got three hostages instead of two.”

  Ellis stared back silently, but Danny saw a vein bulging in his neck.

  “What do you say, Major?” Biegler asked Danny, his voice edged with mockery. “I say it’s time to get the FBI in here. Past time. Old Billy Ray here just proved he hasn’t got the sand for this job—”

  The sheriff hit Biegler so fast that Danny didn’t see his fist cross the space between them, and so hard that the government agent dropped where he stood and lay motionless on the floor.

  “I warned him,” Ellis said. “Get him out of here, Trace.”

  Trace Breen jumped up from the radio and dragged Biegler out of the trailer by his heels, gulping in awe all the way.

  “Lock the door when you come back,” Ellis ordered.

  After Trace had locked the door, the sheriff said, “Ray’ll be coming in any second, soon as he calms down. Tell your brother to guard the door and keep Biegler out. I don’t want to see that son of a bitch again tonight.”

  “Biegler or Ray?” Trace asked.

  “Biegler!”

  Trace nodded and went back to his radio.

  Sheriff Ellis led Danny to a corner and spoke softly. “I hate to admit it, but I’m about out of ideas. Do we just wait, or what?”

  Danny shook his head. Grant Shields’s sudden reappearance had given him a chance he had thought lost moments ago. “Sometimes the best thing is to do nothing, but this isn’t one of those times. If things aren’t getting better, they’re getting worse. You know?”

  Ellis nodded. “Agreed.”

  “I’ve got one idea, and I want you to seriously consider it.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I want to go into the house. Physically go in and talk to Shields face-to-face.”

  Ellis stared back in disbelief. “Unarmed, you mean?”

  “If I go in with a gun, he’s liable to shoot me.”

  As Ellis’s eyes searched his, Danny realized that the sheriff wasn’t the middling-dumb country boy that people like Marilyn Stone thought he was.

  “I get the feeling I’m missing something,” Ellis said. “First off, Shields asks to talk to you—not me, not his lawyer, not his pastor—you. Then he talks to you like you are his pastor. And now you want to walk unarmed into a house where a disturbed man who’s probably already murdered one person is holding his family at gunpoint. Have I got that right?”

  Danny had tried not to think too much about the risks of his plan, but Ellis wasn’t going to let him off that easy. He hadn’t known himself how he felt until a split second before Ray Breen was going to blow the windows—before the 7.62 millimeter bullet in Carl’s rifle would have blasted Warren Shields’s laboring heart into mush. After Carl sighted the boy on the roof and Sheriff Ellis turned to Danny for guidance, Danny could easily have said “Go,” rather than “Abort.” If he had, Shields would be dead now, and Laurel would be a widow. A single woman, free to spend her life with whomever she chose.
Danny wanted Laurel more than he’d wanted any woman in his life. But when the power had been given him to possess her—twice now, he realized—he’d been unable to take her. The first time because he wouldn’t give up his son to have her; this time because he couldn’t live the rest of his life with a decent man’s blood on his hands. But something deeper than this had stopped him, something he still couldn’t quite pin down. He was trying to unravel the feeling when five sharp bangs rattled the trailer door.

  “Open up, damn it!” roared a muted voice. “It’s me, Ray!”

  Trace got up, but the sheriff waved him back to his seat.

  “Talk to me, Danny,” Ellis urged. “Time’s short.”

  Danny raised his hand to his mouth as though he were about to throw up. The dark epiphany that had begun as he hovered over the backyard had finally revealed itself to him. “Shields wants us to kill him.”

  Ellis’s eyes went wide. “What? You mean . . . like suicide by cop?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Because of the cancer?”

  “I don’t know. Yes and no. Deep down, he’s a John Wayne type. No matter how bad Shields may want to kill himself, he sees suicide as a coward’s way out. I don’t think dying of cancer scares him. The pain of it, I mean. It’s the indignity. He’s too proud for that.”

  Ellis’s eyes seemed focused on something beyond Danny. “I can relate to that. My daddy died of lung cancer, and I watched every minute of it. That’s no way to go.”

  Ray Breen’s next bovine bellow shook the aluminum skin of the trailer. “I’m soaking wet, goddamn it! Let me in!”

  “In a minute!” Ellis roared back. Then his jaw muscles clenched, and he stroked his incipient jowls. “Tell me why I should let you go in that house. What hope have you got?”

  “Shields trusts me. I might be able to get close enough to get the gun away from him.”

  Ellis snorted. “If that’s your plan, forget it. That’s begging to get killed. Ask any cop.”

  Danny almost felt emboldened to confide in the sheriff about Laurel. The man had a grasp of the complexities of life; but how far would a Baptist deacon bend the rules?